EDMONTON - I was on vacation when the floods hit southern Alberta and I watched the drama unfold with a mixture of horror and admiration — horror at the severity of the damage and admiration at so many Albertans who rallied to help.

I was even impressed by the response of the Alberta government that has worked tirelessly for people whose homes have been literally washed away.

Those are the glimmers of good news amid so much bad.

The bad news will be measured in the billions of dollars worth of property damage, not to mention the immeasurable impact on peoples’ lives.

And then there’s the bittersweet realization of why we are so very good at responding to disasters in Alberta. It’s in no small part because of the resilience of Albertans — and we live in a province with an efficient bureaucracy and plenty of money.

But it is, sadly, also because we’re getting so much practice.

The one-in-a-century disasters are happening much more often.

The flood in southern Alberta has parallels, both disturbing and heartwarming, to the forest fire that devastated Slave Lake two years ago.

In both cases, residents had little to no warning of the cataclysm approaching and the government response was generous and swift.

Those are two of the high-profile disasters. There have been many other lower profile emergencies. In fact, according to a report from the Insurance Bureau of Canada, Alberta was the natural disaster capital of Canada in 2012. More than 60 per cent of all insurance losses across the country caused by heavy rains, hail and wind happened right here. Put in dollar terms, Alberta’s claims totalled $730 million.

The bill this year, of course, will be much higher.

Nobody knows what the future will bring — but it doesn’t look good. That’s not just based on the forecasts of scientists but on the actuarial predictions of insurance companies that look to the future with alarm.

The insurance bureau’s report says in the next 30 years various regions of Canada will see “an increase in wildfires, drought, water scarcity, lightning flash density and the risk of hail storms. Also, parts of the country will see more intense winter storms, more freezing rain and precipitation, as well as a significant decline in sea ice cover and increased coastal erosion.”

Looking just at our corner of the world, a 2012 study on rainfall patterns in the Prairies the past century has identified dramatic changes. Rainfall that used to fall in scattered storms in parts of a river basin over the summer is now falling in longer and more dramatic storms over an entire basin.

A co-author of the report, Prof. John Pomeroy at the University of Saskatchewan, says these prolonged storms have increased the likelihood of large “run-off events.”

“We have seen increasing trends for long and spatial extensive rainfall events in the Prairie provinces that can be attributed to global change,” said Pomeroy. “The Alberta flood of 2013 and Manitoba-Saskatchewan floods of 2011 and 2012 fit into this category.”

The extreme weather we’re witnessing is precisely what climate change scientists have been warning us about.

And that brings us to the big question: what are we going to do about it?

Well, we should be doing a much better job of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions all around the world. But that’s not happening. Which brings us to the second part of the answer: mitigation.

We have to do a better job of preparing for the next disaster closer to home, be it a forest fire or flood or something else an increasingly hot-tempered Mother Nature will throw at us.

A report on flood mitigation written seven years ago by former MLA George Groeneveld (and only released last year) recommends, among other things, that the government stop selling Crown lands in flood-risk areas for development and that the government not distribute financial assistance for “inappropriate development in flood-risk areas.” Groeneveld suggests existing development still be eligible for disaster recovery compensation but in the future we enact a moratorium on new development on flood plains and those people who go ahead and build anyway will be on their own when disaster strikes.

The Alberta government is still mulling over those recommendations but one official said the province will “be sitting down with both the federal and municipal levels of government soon to discuss how we deal with the issue of Crown land and flood plains and what kind of restrictions should be placed on it.”

It sounds promising but the government will also be under tremendous pressure from developers and municipalities to allow lucrative development in flood plains.

The government, though, should ignore those voices and listen to experts such as Pomeroy who see the recent floods and forest fires as a disturbing sign of things to come.

“We’ve got different atmospheric dynamics and we’re getting events like this that were improbable or even literally impossible before,” says Pomeroy. “And we should expect more of them.”

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